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What, if anything, does reading literature do for our lives? What can literature offer that other forms of writing cannot? Can fictions teach us anything? Can they make people more moral? Why do we take pleasure in tragic stories? This course introduces students to major problems at the intersection of philosophy and literature. It addresses key questions about the value of literature, philosophical puzzles about the nature of fiction and literary language, and ways that philosophy and literature interact. Readings span literature, film, and philosophical theories of art. Authors may include Sophocles, Dickinson, Toni Morrison, Proust, Woolf, Walton, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Students master close reading techniques and philosophical analysis, and write papers combining the two. This is the required gateway course for the Philosophy and Literature major tracks. Majors should register in their home department.

ITALIC 91:Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture, Creating

Creating, is the first part of ITALIC, a year-long course that explores the ways people make and encounter a wide range of artworks, including music and performance, the visual arts, literature, film and other media. In
ITALIC 91 we ask: How do artists innovate? What roles can earlier artworks play in new creations? How do audiences create? In addressing these questions, we will read texts by Viktor Shklovsky, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Susan Sontag, among others. We will attend Tosca at the San Francisco Opera, the Susan Meiselas exhibition at SFMoMA, as well as street art and the home of the conceptual artist David Ireland in the Mission District of San Francisco. We will also have a class visit by the St. Lawrence String Quartet and attend a performance by the musician Nitin Sawhney with the dancer/choreographers WangRamirez on campus. In order to make talking about art a part of daily life, students taking ITALIC live together in Burbank and eat lunch with their professors after class on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The course enhances its academic endeavors with art-making opportunities in section and a two-week practicum with Dan Klein devoted to the art of improv.

ITALIC 92:Immersion in the Arts: Living in Culture, Interpreting

Interpreting, is the second part of ITALIC, a year-long course that explores the ways people make and encounter a wide range of artworks, including music and performance, the visual arts, literature, film and other media. Why do artworks affect us and how do we make sense of them? What makes it difficult to describe works of art and how can we do this well? How do our individual experiences influence our responses and interpretations? To address these questions in the winter quarter of ITALIC, we will read texts by such thinkers as Roland Barthes, Georg Simmel, and Roman Jakobson and attend various exhibitions and performances on and off campus, including a performances of the internationally-recognized Batsheva Dance Company at Memorial Auditorium. In conjunction with a specially-commissioned artwork by Mark Dion at the Cantor Arts Center, we will consider how contemporary artists are re-interpreting museum collections and think of curation as a form of art-making. Again, ITALIC will enhance its academic endeavors with art-making in section and in a two-week practicum with Marisa Galvez on Performing Trobar, which engages students in the literary and performative modes of troubadour lyrics.

Why are lovers in storybooks East and West always star-crossed? Why do love and death seem to go together? For every Romeo and Juliet, there are dozens of doomed lovers in the Asian literary repertoires, from Genji's string of embittered mistresses, to the Butterfly lovers in early modern China, to the voices of desire in Koryo love songs, to the devoted adolescent cousins in Dream of the Red Chamber, to the media stars of Korean romantic drama, now wildly popular throughout Asia. In this course, we explore how the love story has evolved over centuries of East Asian history, asking along the way what we can learn about Chinese, Japanese, and Korean views of family and community, gender and sexuality, truth and deception, trust and betrayal, ritual and emotion, and freedom and solidarity from canonical and non-canonical works in East Asian literatures. N.B. This is the second of three courses in the East Asian track. These courses offer an unparalleled opportunity to study East Asian history and culture, past and present. Take all three to experience a year-long intellectual community dedicated to exploring how ideas have shaped our world and future.

Last offered: Winter 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

JAPAN 22Q:Humanities Core: How to be Modern in East Asia (CHINA 22Q, COMPLIT 22Q, HUMCORE 22Q)

Modern East Asia was almost continuously convulsed by war and revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries. But the everyday experience of modernity was structured more profoundly by the widening gulf between the country and the city, economically, politically, and culturally. This course examines literary and cinematic works from China and Japan that respond to and reflect on the city/country divide, framing it against issues of class, gender, national identity, and ethnicity. It also explores changing ideas about home/hometown, native soil, the folk, roots, migration, enlightenment, civilization, progress, modernization, nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and sustainability. All materials are in English. N.B. This is the third of three courses in the East Asian track. These courses offer an unparalleled opportunity to study East Asian history and culture, past and present. Take all three to experience a year-long intellectual community dedicated to exploring how ideas have shaped our world and future.

Last offered: Spring 2019
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II
| Repeatable for credit

JAPAN 60:Asian Arts and Cultures (ARTHIST 2)

An exploration of the visual arts of East and South Asia from ancient to modern times, in their social, religious, literary and political contexts. Analysis of major monuments of painting, sculpture and architecture will be organized around themes that include ritual and funerary arts, Buddhist art and architecture across Asia, landscape and narrative painting, culture and authority in court arts, and urban arts in the early modern world.

This class is structured around three motifs: love suicide (as a romantic ideal), female desire, and same-sex sexuality. Over the course of the quarter we will look at how these motifs are treated in the art and entertainment from three different moments of Japanese history: the Edo period (1615-1868), the modern period (1920-65), and the contemporary period (1965-present). We will start by focusing on the most traditional representations of these topics. Subsequently, we will consider how later artists and entertainers revisited the conventional treatments of these motifs, informing them with new meanings and social significance. We will devote particular attention to how this material comments upon issues of gender, sexuality, and human relationships in the context of Japan. Informing our perspective will be feminist and queer theories of reading and interpretation.

Many of us have grown up eating "Asian" at home, with friends, on special occasions, or even without full awareness that Asian is what we were eating. This course situates the three major culinary traditions of East Asia--China, Japan, and Korea--in the histories and civilizations of the region, using food as an introduction to their rich repertoires of literature, art, language, philosophy, religion, and culture. It also situates these seemingly timeless gastronomies within local and global flows, social change, and ethical frameworks. Specifically, we will explore the traditional elements of Korean court food, and the transformation of this cuisine as a consequence of the Korean War and South Korea¿s subsequent globalizing economy; the intersection of traditional Japanese food with past and contemporary identities; and the evolution of Chinese cuisine that accompanies shifting attitudes about the environment, health, and well-being. Questions we will ask ourselves during the quarter include, what is "Asian" about Asian cuisine? How has the language of food changed? Is eating, and talking about eating, a gendered experience? How have changing views of the self and community shifted the conversation around the ethics and ecology of meat consumption?

Terms: Spr
| Units: 3
| UG Reqs: WAY-A-II

2019-2020 Spring

Translation lies at the heart of all intercultural exchange. This course introduces students to the specific ways in which translation has shaped the image of Japan in the West, the image of the West in Japan, and Japan's self-image in the modern period. What texts and concepts were translated by each side, how, and to what effect? No prior knowledge of Japanese language necessary.

Did you grow up watching Pokémon and Power Rangers? Have you danced along to "Gangnam Style"? As we become increasingly exposed to Asian popular culture and the Internet facilitates instant access to new media, previous localized forms of entertainment--animated cartoons, comics, video games, music videos, film, and soap operas--have become part of a global staple. However, these cultural forms have emerged not only in their original form with mediation of subtitles. Many have undergone various processes of adaptation and translation so that we no longer recognize that these products had ever originated elsewhere. This course will immerse students in a range of Japanese and Korean cultural phenomena to reveal the spectrum of translation practices across national boundaries. We will inquire into why these cultural forms have such compelling and powerful staying power, contextualize them within their frames of production, and explore the strategies, limitations, and potential of translational practices.nnContact instructor for place. dafnazur@stanford.edunKnight 201.